A Words Enthusiast

[hedgehog.chess]

GERMAN:
Geschenktüten sind sehr praktisch und kommen in vielen verschiedenen Farben und Größen daher. Sie sind außerdem ziemlich teuer, vor allem wenn du größere und exklusivere Tüten kaufst. Und manchmal findet man trotzdem keine, die einem wirklich gefällt. Bastle deinen eigenen Geschenktüten und lege sie für kommende Geburtstage oder andere Anlässe zurück. Der oder die Beschenkte werden sich mit Sicherheit über die individuelle Beigabe freuen.
https://vocaroo.com/i/s1AGcCE79PvH

Bravo! Awesome!

[Axon]

How did you find stuff in other languages? Everything is in English for me and I can't seem to change the language either.

It's a small box on the side of the front page. Each language option has a different domain, it's not just another page on the base site. I imagine you might like https://fr.wikihow.com/Accueil and https://www.wikihow.it/Pagina-principale. It's clear to me that many articles are translated from English, but as far as I can tell it's done very well. A lot of these articles are extremely detailed and absolutely perfect for learning more everyday vocabulary.

[Neurotip]

I wish more people would post recordings that aren't perfect. I like hearing everybody's voices.

Well, I do, and I really enjoy hearing other people too. I'm very impressed by your recordings, both the quality and quantity of languages, and TBH I'm glad they don't include either of my current TLs or I think I would feel rather small. Keep up the good work!

[Axon]

Thank you for the kind words! Neurotip, a while ago I heard your recordings of Italian and Icelandic and I was extremely impressed. Don't sell yourself short!

I've been toying with the idea of posting writing for corrections on iTalki. One day on the subway I recorded some self-talk, and although it took me some time to get through a short story I stayed able to speak in German. That gave me confidence, and so I finally bit the bullet last week and wrote in German and Indonesian. To my surprise I received very detailed and very helpful corrections extremely quickly. To be honest it wasn't even entirely clear to me before that this feature was entirely free and just needs a sign-in.

Right before writing this entry I did another German post there, a longer one of 220 words. It took a while to get started but once I thought of a good thing to write about I was able to come up with quite a bit to say. Hopefully I pulled it off. I aimed quite a bit higher with some more literary constructions and advanced words.

I watched and read a significant amount of English pronunciation advice in Mandarin over a few days in preparation for a private pronunciation lesson that I conducted in Mandarin. This is a subject I've been interested in for a while, and I've been watching occasional videos in Chinese about it for probably a year or so. I understand the vast majority of the technical terms and the way pronunciation is taught, but when I gave the lesson I was surprised that I couldn't actually do it as fluently as the instructor I'd been watching on my first try. Go figure. I'll get better at that with time for sure. I'd say this is a type of speaking that represents a new level in my ability since arriving in China in August.

The last few days I've been back in my girlfriend's home province of Sichuan. I've written before how difficult it is for me to participate in group conversations that are entirely held in Sichuanese. When I add something in standard Mandarin, even if it's correct, I can hear the strong dissonance between the dialects and I don't like it. I also tend to think in and translate to English when I'm listening to a conversation in Sichuanese, which I think has made my spoken Mandarin worse in these past few days. I'm wondering if it might be worth it to try to learn some active skills in Sichuanese because I'll be seeing all these people again for Chinese New Year and I'm a little frustrated with not being able to easily converse.

But some benefits are that I've further improved my Sichuanese listening and fit together a few more puzzle pieces about how it differs from standard Mandarin. There are several speakers that I understand better than before. Also, in my defense, a lot of the conversations I'm exposed to are made up of five or six people and a few children all talking at once with the TV in the background. It's the deep end for sure.

Finally, Russian keeps appearing in my life more than random chance would predict. I think I'll ramp it up a little bit, and then integrate it more heavily into my 2019 study plans. I'm at the stage reading Russian that I was with Mandarin in early 2017. Each time I pick up a text I have very little stamina but I'm always a little bit surprised at how well I do.

It's only October but I'm carefully considering and revising my language goals for 2019.

[Axon]

Here's a little example of a very quick-and-dirty pronunciation exercise you can do at home by yourself. I call it Dual Recording because I can't think of a catchy name.

1. Find a text that will take you about a minute to read. I'll use one of my corrected ones from iTalki. It's probably better if you write it yourself, but I usually read news or Wikihow for this.

2. Read it aloud.

Ich war 2016 im Urlaub in Vietnam mit einem guten Freund von mir. Damals hatten wir beide die Idee, dass wir so viel Geld wie möglich sparen sollten. Also gingen wir beide meistens in kleine lokale Restaurants, die klein, dunkel, und vor allem billig waren. Eines Tages waren wir besonders hungrig. Wir beschlossen in ein viel größeres und teuereres Restaurant zu gehen, aber als wir angekommen waren, bemerkten wir, dass wir gar nichts über gutes Essen in Vietnam wussten. Es gab fast nichts auf der Speisekarte, was wir erkennen konnten.

Endlich entschieden wir uns für Chicken Gristle. Was war Chicken Gristle? Das wussten wir auch nicht, aber es war relativ billig und sah wie gebratenes Hähnchen aus.

Es war gebratener Knorpel. Nur Knorpel. Es gab nichts mehr als schleimigen, schwer zu kauenden Knorpel.

Um kein Essen zu vergeuden, habe ich alles gegessen.

3. Listen to the recording immediately and follow along with your text. Short texts are good here because you can keep mental note of your missteps. Think about your voice and delivery along with your pronunciation.

4.Record a second time.

5. Listen a second time without the text.

Simple, quick, and you may not even notice how much you're re-reading the same text, especially if you start and stop or do other takes or Vocaroo fails several times like just now.

[Axon]

Aside from the odd iTalki writing, online courses, and brief everyday Chinese interactions, I haven't been doing very much output. Input, though, has never seen better days.

In German I've worked through six or seven hours of Die Frage. I love it. I understand virtually every word from the hosts, though there is a noticeable drop in comprehension when they go interview somebody else. I wish there were a lot more episodes. They research questions like "What does it take to become someone else?" and "How bad is prison?" and "Was Granddad a Nazi?"

I downloaded an hour's worth of Spanish CuriosaMente videos as mp3. I use the program 4K Video Downloader to do this very easily. Again I understand virtually everything from these, which is great because I can tell they're getting my Spanish listening warmed up again for when I tackle other, more difficult subjects. I have some stuff from Radio Educacion but didn't find it as appealing. I also listened to the first episode of El Gran Apagon, which I understood less of and thus found less interesting.

I have several podcasts in Indonesian too, but none of them hit the sweet spot of comprehensibleness and production value and topic necessary to keep me listening. IndonesianPod101 publishes their listening exercises on YouTube. One of them is "80 minutes of advanced Indonesian Listening" which, while actually being 40 minutes of each dialogue repeated twice, is nevertheless exactly the level I'm looking for. Lots of very realistic dialogues of Indonesian people in everyday situations. The language includes lots of summarizing and asking for clarification, and that's really helpful. I can interpret these dialogues to English if I focus all my concentration on it - definitely not something I can do while walking around.

I've racked up a handful of hours in French too with Harry Potter 4 and something called Tram 83 from RFI. Tram 83 sounds wonderful but I really only understand the isolated word or phrase. Excellent production value though.

Even Russian got a little bit of action - listened to the first hour of the Ender's Game audiobook (the only hour on my phone). Did a Lingvist lesson and browsed Easy Russian videos on YouTube.

[Axon]

I've had relatively more free time these days to hang out and study. A boring yet lucrative translation job is coming up ... any minute now...

It's been close to three years since I regularly used Memrise, but I believe I've picked up the habit again for Chinese. It's worked extremely well for me in the past, perhaps even more so for Chinese because each card gets double reviews when you get tested on pronunciation too. It's easier and easier for me to read formal connected text in Chinese. Last night I picked up a linguistics textbook and got a ways through the introduction before the unknowns started to pile up. If I skip around I can get a lot more.
I'm "attacking Chinese reading on two fronts" in perhaps the laziest war ever waged. One front is an HSK 5 deck on Memrise, where I skip all the words I know already but usually keep doing the pronunciation tests to make sure I know all the character readings. I normally do this for about five or ten minutes a day. The other is manually re-typing all the example sentences from my HSK 5 study book into a Google doc.
Yesterday I made a list of a bunch of weights, measures, and materials that I don't know but should. This includes words like hectare, milliliter, concrete, cardboard, fluorescent light, matte, transparent, and so on. Stuff that every native speaker can talk about and describe, and stuff that I see every day. Some of these stuck right away as I was making the list (i.e. I can still recall them now) and others I'll need to study more. I tried to import the list automatically into Memrise but that function didn't work for me. I'll keep working on it.

Continued to listen fairly extensively to German and Spanish on the subway. I'm just beginning to realize the power of easily downloading videos from YouTube as mp3s with the 4K Video Downloader I mentioned last time. Turns out there are a bunch of German Hörspiele on YouTube, including the audioplays for the original Star Wars films. The voice actors for Eine Neue Hoffnung are fantastic. They really capture the feeling of the actors in the original - all except for Harrison Ford, so far.
CuriosaMente continues to be a fantastic production, and I barely even notice that they were originally produced as videos instead of podcasts. I love the host's energy and he speaks very clearly in an accent I'd like to have too.

There's a particular video in Teochew on Youtube that I really like. It's an interview with a womanwho fled from Vietnam in the 1980s. I've watched it, oh, five or six times, and each time I think I understand more and more Teochew because I can kind of match what she's saying to the subtitles. I also have additional experience with other Southern Min varieties including having spent a handful of hours on Teochew specifically. Long story short, when I listen to this audio, I can pick out maybe five percent of the words, relying heavily on my memory of how the interview goes. Even my Vietnamese comprehension is better than that.

I mentioned the Pod101 listening comprehension videos in my last post. I'll expand about the Indonesian one: that's exactly how people talk when you arrange things like renting a car, staying at a hotel, and filling out a gym membership. I think all the topics are the same for each language (beginner Cantonese and Vietnamese both start with the same scenarios at least) but it certainly seems they localized the dialogue well. They're all subtitled as well. They're divided into absolute beginner, beginner etc but I would call even the lowest-level ones "upper beginner." So far I have no issues with the content. The French male voice sounds like he has a cold, but I've never been picky about listening to a particular style of French and I figure it's just helping my comprehension.

[Axon]

...any minute now...

Although I've kept up a lot of listening on the subway, I've veered slightly away from audioplays in the last ten days.

I've listened to A New Hope (twice), Empire Strikes Back, and The Phantom Menace in German as well as getting most of the way through Return of the Jedi and Attack of the Clones. It seems that the audioplays for the original trilogy were released along with the movies, and then they were remastered with new narrators later on as a complete set. I wouldn't describe myself as a super-hardcore Star Wars fan (there are always more hardcore fans than you), but it's certainly been present in my life for a long time. I've always liked the books and video games as well as the movies. Turns out pretty much everything Star Wars also exists in German, which is perfect. A lot more to read and listen to than Harry Potter.

Repeating things I consume in English in another language is very enjoyable, but once I cover a series/franchise in a new language I prefer not to repeat it in other L2s. Therefore Star Wars and Calvin and Hobbes are German, while Artemis Fowl is Spanish and Doraemon is Indonesian. Harry Potter is slowly becoming French. I haven't found or gotten into much translated content in Chinese or Russian. I suppose the only exception to this is Ender's Game, which I have read all or part of in German, Polish, Russian, and Chinese. Emphasis on the "part of."

I've been very busy lately so the little projects with the HSK book and the new Memrise course have stalled. Nevertheless I have been noticing a slow improvement in Chinese. There was a time not so long ago when I had to painstakingly feed every little bit of "natural Chinese" through a reader and converter, especially for anything approaching news. Now I can scroll through clickbait headlines like a local. Wouldn't you know it, clickbait sites turn out to be a waste of time in any language.

Ran into some Russian speakers the other day. At this point, I think I've encountered more Russian speakers in China than tourists of any other language background. Didn't chat but understood more of their conversation than I expected. I was also able to have a very fluent exchange in my head, as you do. I've downloaded and listened to a good amount of Russian Progress and expect that to continue.

[Adrianslont]

On the subject of translated content into Chinese, I recall seeing dozens of old movies (I’m pretty sure) dubbed into mandarin in a store in Singapore. Mohammed, Mustafa, Samsudin department store if you know it. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that stuff elsewhere, too - I’m talking Gone with the Wind, Africa Queen, that era. You may prefer Disney nostalgia? Pretty sure you’d find Disney stuff in mandarin and canto.

But maybe you know all that?

[Axon]

Classic films dubbed into Mandarin? No, I hadn't heard of that! It's pretty hard to find Mandarin dubs of live-action movies since it's significantly cheaper to just add subs. Animation dubs are more common, though it's all streaming now in China. I actually don't think I've ever seen a DVD or Blu-Ray store in China.

I've been to San Francisco's Chinatown scores of times since I grew up near there. They've always had great DVD shops with all kinds of imported movies. Unfortunately the most recent time I was there I had just started learning Chinese and didn't think to ask for (or even consider) dubbed films that I know.

Searching for "国语配音" (Mandarin dub) on Youtube brings up hundreds of hours of anime that I've never seen. The same thing on Tmall (one of several online Chinese retailers) was a hit: it returns every Transformers and Marvel Universe movie among lots of action movies. Some of the top results include Laurence Olivier's Hamlet and a 1944 musical called Bathing Beauty.

By the way, you can search for "dubbing Indonesia" "dub Indo" and get a lot of anime as well, though never Pokemon unfortunately. "Bersuara Indonesia" sometimes works too. I asked in several Indonesian video stores when I was there but I think they only do dubbing for broadcast. Downloads of these broadcasts (mostly for kids' movies) do exist but as they're recordings of copyrighted material I won't tell you where they are